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One simple truth is slowly transforming my life: there’s a reason stuff happens. There’s a reason I have bad days and good days. There are choices I make. My life is a collection of habits, piled one on top of the other. If I don’t like my life, then I need to take a close look at those habits. One or more of them could be dropped, changed, or added, and those simple, repetitive actions can create an entirely different life. One I like.

The holiday season, stuffed as it is with high-fat, high-calorie foods, inevitably leads to certain high-minded resolution lists. Those lists don’t work too well for me. I like writing them out just as a look into what goals are formulating in my brain, but I don’t take them too seriously. Lists don’t make your life. Habits do.

Healthy Food Habits: Change Is Possible

If you’re not happy with something in the food/diet/fitness/nutrition area of your life, change is simple. Change is possible. Change is made one habit at a time. Crash diets are effective only for as long as you can keep crashing, and crashing isn’t a healthy lifestyle. Drastic lifestyle changes, made overnight, tend to disappear as quickly as they came. It’s one doable step at a time.

The Steps of Change For Healthy Food Habits

1. Identify Problem Areas: Think about the area of your food life that bothers you most. Is it the junk food you eat? The fast food you resort to on late nights? The constant eating out because you can never think of something good to cook? The way your refrigerator looks either a) strangely bare and neglected or b) crammed with slowly decaying food you don’t want to eat? Perhaps it’s your lack of energy, or libido? Or the way your teeth feel after you drink a soda, or the way your head feels after you eat sugary food, or the way you feel when you don’t eat often enough? Whatever it is, it’s related to a habit in your life.

2. Identify Problem Habits: Once you identify the particular area you really wish you could change, look at the habits that control that area. This is not flail-the-witness time. Don’t be judgmental. It is what it is, and that’s okay. You don’t need to go to confession because you ate a bag of chips for supper last night. You just need to figure out what habits you have that get you to the point when chips seem like a good decision.

3. Pick One Habit to Change: Make a list of the habits that seem most influential, or the ones that most directly relate to the food area you want to change. Then, pick one habit. Just one. Don’t storm the castle, don’t slay the dragon, don’t write out two pages of food resolutions. Choose one habit. Drink water instead of soda. Drink green tea instead of coffee. Buy fruit instead of potato chips. Cook vegetables instead of bread. Eat salad instead of dessert. Plan your week’s menu instead of making it up as you go along. Shop organic instead of convenience. Make sandwiches instead of eating fast food. Stock your refrigerator with appetizing, healthy food instead of spending your money on restaurants.

Pick one habit, and do what you need to in order to drop the old and establish a new, better habit. Track your daily progress somehow: on your blog, on a food website, with a phone call to your friend, by writing it down in a journal. Review your progress weekly. If you slip up a couple of times, that’s okay. You’re learning. You’re putting a good habit into place. Be consistent with this new habit for a full month; then, and only then, should you revisit that list and decide which habit is next.

Small, Consistent Changes Can Change YOU

Change is most effective when it is small, consistent, and perpetual over time. This holiday season, don’t make yourself feel guilty for not being “better” than you are. Simply focus on one habit at a time to help yourself create a food lifestyle that is simple, sustainable, and satisfying.

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